


To Define "Love"

by sp8ce



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ambiguity, Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, Empathy Issues, Eridan Ampora/Feferi Peixes Moirallegiance, F/M, Falling In Love, Loss, Love, M/M, Minor Sollux Captor/Feferi Peixes, Moving On, One Shot, Starting Over, Unrequited Love, feferi struggles with love and empathy, he clearly is in love with her but i didn't want to put it in their tag because that would be sad, instrospective oneshot..., main pairing eridan/sollux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-28
Updated: 2019-03-28
Packaged: 2019-12-25 17:26:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18265994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sp8ce/pseuds/sp8ce
Summary: Eridan struggles with losing the love of the person he defined what love is through.





	To Define "Love"

You thought love was Feferi.

You mean, after all, she is what made sense.

How else could you describe how you came to understand what love meant? What other way was there besides late night texts and open vulnerability? She was your first crush, the first girl you fell in love with, the first person you ever even really _loved_. She was beauty and laughter. She was perfection, but not only perfection, but loving someone besides the flaws you see in them, besides her cruel side that only you deserved, but sometimes slipped out like a dagger at night to unsuspecting innocents. You knew she was manipulative at times. Sometimes you felt like you knew her better than she knew herself.

Isn’t that what love is? You loved her regardless. She was everything you wanted in a future. You accepted every part of her, and you never wanted to let her go. You’d grown up with her; she was tied into every part of your life and your mind, interweaving patterns of development.

She never really wanted _you_ though.

You know there has to be something there because if there isn’t you’re afraid she might not be completely capable of love. She’d admitted that to you a few times when you were younger, how she felt vaguely confused by all this attachment, how she didn’t understand what you meant when you said you loved her, how she didn’t know how to return it to anyone, even you. You tried to explain to her love, or not explain, but share your own definition of it. Because human connection has always been so very important to you. She said it sounded whiny, and you often felt like a sea snail without a shell. One time, when you were both thirteen, she said she finally _really_ understood what it meant for someone to love. Because why else would she put up with you anyways? You’ve always wished you could be better for her, less abrasive, less annoying, less whiny and dramatic. Something worthy of her love. But you think she got it in her own way then. That her bound to you was something beyond “use” or beyond momentary enjoyment. They say teaching someone something helps you learn it better, and boy, did you ever learn to define what love meant through her.

It cut like a fish through the water the day you realised you had to let her go.

She always had a flair for the dramatic that you couldn’t. Your eccentricities were obvious to anyone who even looked at you, but you could never match the way she could drop care like dropping pennies into a fountain. You wished you could have stayed in her pocket. Or maybe you wish she could have swallowed you whole and let you suffocate instead of have to find a future without her in it.

Because she is _love._ She is what love is. How can you let go of that? How can you let go of that first kiss she swore you into secrecy about, or how you would talk endlessly about a future, a future that she was always in? A future she encouraged you to reach, to never just be talk. She shaped you, and maybe you also affected her in that same way. She was your _best friend_. How could you let her go? How could you be anything but everything to her? It’s not like you’d ever spam her with messages once it got past through your vulnerable skull she didn’t want them. It’s not like you were going to stalk her or annoy her to death, because hey, you already annoyed her into dropping you, didn’t you?

It just took meeting someone else, someone better, or at least better suited to her needs at that time, for her to forget about you. But how is that what love is? What do we even owe to one another? Something more than this. You love her, and you respect her enough to let her go. But how? How are you ever ever going to love again?

She is what love is. You don’t know what else there could be. Because isn’t that everything, the intensity, the expanse and beauty, the _meaning_ of that love?

What else could love even be?

\--

What you feel for him, now that’s not love.

He messages you late one night like, _hey, Feferi, you know her right?_ (Because of course you do, the two of you were everything, the two of your were tied together in ways that aren’t just in your mind, but ways that were apparent to everyone around you), and he’s like _she’s kinda two-sided right_?

You want to laugh or scream or cry, and you kind of do all at once. You’re so angry; you’re livid; you’re blood in the water spreading all red and murky. It’s the first text you’ve gotten in so long you can’t recall.

She has never ever been two-sided or double faced or whatever _he is_ that she isn’t. _Two-_ sided, the gall of him. She’s always been so truly exactly what her concept of self means. Just because other people read her wrong doesn’t mean she was hiding something. How can you hide what you’re not aware of being there? You want to lord it over him, how much you know her better than him. He might know her now in a way that you don’t, but you knew her weird way of picking out useful friends and the way she talked to you like she couldn’t understand anything else. Part of your personality had revolved around being vital to her. It always made you proud it was enough to make up for everything wrong with what you are. But wasn’t it obvious for anyone else to see? Sometimes you wondered how they were fooled.

Maybe people have trouble seeing the things in other people they don’t see in themselves. How much of what we are is a reflection of what we believe to be true about ourselves? How much of your self-loathing was apparent to everyone around you that needed to drop you in a second.

You don’t know how to handle his messages though. You’re too empty of everything, even the love you know is eternal, but not loud right now for her.

So you just tell him she isn’t two-sided, that his observation skills of who she is must have been shit.

It’s weird, why such a condescending message like that piques his interest in you when everything you’ve been to him has been a nuisance at best, and everything she’s ever said about you must have been so negative.

You have been so focused on trying to open yourself up to the possibility of new friendships and new love, even if it will never compare to the meaning of _her_ , that you don’t even realise that you don’t have to try with him.

But it certainly doesn’t feel like love. He asks you how, then, do you know what love is if the only person you’ve ever loved the way you love her is a psychopath?

But doesn’t he realise how wrong he is about her? Doesn’t he realise that love doesn’t have to be so cut and dry? And why does he think insulting her will help? Does he think he earned that right with the way she hurt him? How is it love if he doesn’t love her despite the way she can sometimes be cold?

He says if you are but water and she is as cold as ice, then she will always float over you. But you don’t understand how he can’t hold the two thoughts in his head at once, the fact that she is warm yet apathetic. He thinks she must be manipulative, but what if she isn’t? You try, what if she isn’t manipulative, but rather unaware and perplexed at herself? Why doesn’t she deserve love just because she struggles with the concept herself? He says because she’ll hurt you.

You don’t know how to handle that because you can’t deny she has. But how can you admit to yourself that you tried so hard to be necessary to her, that you worked so hard for her needs so she would stay in your life, without disrupting the reasons you really did it, the love you had for her, your own compassion at not wanting to see her struggle? The thought of your selfishness repulses you, and the thought of how twisted that must mean the situation is with you is foreign in your head. Can’t Sollux see? It’s all just love. Love love love. You love her, and she loves you back. She has to. Because love is forever, even if she is gone, and your future is lonely.

He wonders, unable to respond to your insistence that she doesn’t mean to trick and be so cruel, he wonder, then, why does no one else see it? Why didn’t he? Why did just you, and your incompetent, worthless being put to light? You just respond what you think, that maybe no one else would see something that she doesn’t see herself. The same way he sees how incompetent and worthless you are as that’s what you see of yourself. _But then why did you_?

Because we defined “love”. And maybe it doesn’t matter to her like it did to you because everything always matters to people in different ways, which you hate, because you move like the wind in your ability to process your identity and world around you, but it still _mattered._

You really don’t like him. You don’t like how unempathetic he is to her, which is ironic given those first topics between the two of you. You don’t like how smart he is in a way that just washes off him while you’ve been drowning in intellectualism your whole life to be worthy of something like that. He’s so inherently worthy that it infuriates you. You wonder what she saw in him to want him and what she saw in him to stop. You’re always so fascinated by those closest to her, what they have in common, what you have in common.

You decide you want to love him because he’s talking to you, and no one else is. You’re devoid of love when it’s all you want. But then he insults you, and you decide it’d be an insult to call it love to the both of you. Love’s greater than that.

Love is her and you, and what you felt, and what you’ll feel again, but not to that degree. How could anything compare to the infinity you felt in the two of your meaning? It had to be important to her too, growing up with you.

How could you start again when you’ve already seen the extent of what love is?

 _But shouldn’t love last, for both parties? Don’t you think you’ll find some other kind of love that doesn’t have to turn into loss?_ He whispers to you one late night on the phone, and wow, how did you let him in like this? Weren’t you supposed to just be arguing about your ex on the internet to pass the time?

 _But how can do you even recreate a meaning like that? Something that deep, something that important? And how do accept then, if there is something more significant to love that lasts, that it is out of your control?_ You respond.

 _Maybe the love you receive isn’t ever in your control._ His words make you want to hang up. You’re not used to feeling this vulnerable.

“None of this was in an effort to control her!” you give out, breaking the vague whispers, loud into the still darkness.

“I never said that, dipshit. Your brain is like a sponge, soaking up false factoids and letting them breed like bacteria.”

“I can’t control my love either. I just know it doesn’t end, and I get to choose to respect that every day in everything I do.”

 _“She’s lucky to have been loved by you,”_ he says, quieter now. You don’t know how to respond to that. You’re not ready for anyone to matter, so less this fuckwad. You don’t think he knows how to respond to himself either, and he hangs up quickly, as if he hasn’t admitted way too much.

Yeah, what you feel for him definitely isn’t love.

But at least hatred and indifference didn’t feel this hollow.

\--

But he’s funny in his cryptic, dark way, and he’s smarter than anyone you’ve ever met. He’s the type of person of course you’d fall in love with. All you want is Feferi and you to share the love you had again, for some semblance of what love is to you to last, but he’s going to change the world, so he’s fully capable of changing your language.

It’s been years since Feferi cut you out of her life, and your hope has diminished, but he’s yellow like light, and it lights up your life.

You think he radiates, and you think yeah, nothing can ever compare with the love you defined with her, but that doesn’t mean love like you defined can’t exist somewhere else, if different and timid and beginnings you don’t want to face. Maybe there’s some sort of love in him that can last.

But that makes you panic because he’d never want you, and what are you thinking? Why would you ever even want to let yourself be that open to the concept of loss again? What is love if not loss? What is loss if not love? If love feels like forever like it did when you close with Feferi, then love isn’t forever because where is she now? And he’d never like you anyways. So what’s the worry. He’d never want you anyways.

You don’t want to fall in love with him. Isn’t he the creep who was rude to her? Isn’t he the asshole who insults you more than he helps you? Isn’t he isn’t he isn’t he Sollux?

He’s _Sollux_ , and before that didn’t mean much to you, and you don’t even like the fact somehow it’s already meaning more. How can love start again like this? You barely knew him, and you knew her more than anything, but now you know him more than you’d like to admit. It’s infuriating. You didn’t even try. It’s like he annoyed you into developing feelings you’d never thought you’d feel again.

But he would never want you. Because you’re Eridan.

But when he first kisses you, he’s so nervous. You’d been laughing together, spending time together because somehow that’s just something you do now, and he’d just ending up kissing you soft, quick on the lips, pulling away shy.

“What?” is all you can say, though you’re saying it through a smile.

“You’re obvious,” he says. “Even I could tell you wanted me to kiss you for a while.”

“Then why now?” you ask, still flustered.

“Because I knew if I wasn’t certain about how I felt, it’d just end up hurting you, and for some godforsaken reason, I didn’t want that,” he says. “You’re too fucking sensitive.”

You didn’t try to fall again, now. But he took the time to learn just how to make you anyways.

\--

It’s not until he chooses you, that you realise how important this is. It’s not until that girl’s fallen for him, and he blushes when texting her, and your heart is sore because you know it’s more loss, you know it’s another end that you didn’t even prepare for because you never thought there’d be another beginning.

But he tells you you’re ridiculous. It doesn’t matter if he has feelings for her, he was always going to choose you. That he could have crushes and still always choose you. That you never had to worry. He says he’ll only see her when you’re around, if you’re scared, if his feelings are so wrong. But you’ve always been naive, and this is exactly how you thought you’d see yourself ruin the best thing you’d ever have, so you tell him you trust him, and that it’s all okay, that you just need reassurances he gives you.

You count on the days for him to leave you, but he doesn’t. He stops texting her so much, and one time, by accident, you see the notification on his screen and it just says _I know you love him, I didn’t mean it that way._

It’s not till then that you realise that yeah, maybe you did learn what love is through Feferi. Maybe she’s still struggling to understand what it means, and maybe, you kind of hope, she thinks about the things you said to her. Maybe you did think nothing would ever compare to her, nothing could compare to the impressive love story the two of you had in a way, and the real lasting one you could have. But it doesn’t matter because Sollux was right. It’s stupid, how much he’s right. It still hurts that the love you had with her wasn’t one that could last, that there could be something besides that, but you’re grateful.

Because you do love Sollux, and it is different than anything you’ve ever felt before.

It’s a love that lasts.

 

**Author's Note:**

> tbh this is a oneshot to help cope with loss, hope it ends one a hopeful note coming from mr destroyer of hope.
> 
> JUST SO YOU KNOW  
> I have other erisol fics written not from this name/link


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